Month: March 2018

Apparently, most people choose a color scheme for their wedding. Guests would see this color in the dresses of the bridal party, in the flowers that make up the bouquets, in the centerpieces gracing the tables, and on the invitations. But me? I chose my venue because I walked in and thought, “I don’t have to decorate this place at all and it will still look good.” In other words, who needs centerpieces? I’m also the woman who, the day after I got engaged, bought myself some roses at the supermarket. They lasted so long, I decided I’d buy my wedding flowers there. The morning of the wedding. And my bridal party? I didn’t need them all to match. Because there was only one person in my bridal party: my maid of honor. I told her she could wear whatever she wanted.

“So you don’t have a color?” she asked.

“Nope.” She just smiled. This is what friends are like. They accept you and all of your oddities. (I have learned in these last four months of wedding planning that not having a “color” was seen as more than just a bit odd).

Then my sister Liz called and let me know my nieces (ages 6 ad 9) were wondering if they were going to be in the wedding.

“Sure. What do they want to do?”

“Flower girls, probably,” said my sister.

“Okay. Then they’ll be flower girls.”

Liz texted me a couple weeks later to let me know that the elder of her two daughters, Ava, announced that she will not be a flower girl. She will be a junior bridesmaid. “Um, okay,” I said. “Is there a difference?” I had to look it up. It seems age is the only qualification for such things: nine to fourteen year olds qualify for this role.

“She wants to wear a different dress than (her sister)Bella,” Liz told me.

“Sure. They can wear whatever they want.”

“You don’t have a color?”

“No.”

“Well, what color are your flowers going to be?”

“Probably some pastels. Yellow, pink. Whatever they have at the supermarket that week.”

Because we were on the phone, I couldn’t see Liz’s eyes roll, but I knew it was happening. She didn’t say anything for a minute. She finds me baffling sometimes (often?). And I’m guessing she was trying to figure out how to continue this conversation with me.

I filled in the gap with, “Your girls always look cute. I’m sure they have some adorable dresses in their closets right now that would be perfect.”

I started to realize that me trying to make everyone’s lives easier by not dictating a color could, perhaps, be making their lives harder: too many options. Lucky for me, a few weeks later, my mother came down and we went to Michael’s to get ideas for flowers. And I loved a little gathering of lavender. “I can just carry this,” I told her. She put it in the midst of some blush colored roses and I said, “That looks nice, too.” So lavender it is.

But do you have any idea how many shades there are of lavender? I didn’t either, until I informed Liz of my selection. She went online to order swatches and texted me, “I am ordering swatches in lavender, lilac, wisteria, and Tahiti. The Dusk color is too grayish/brown, right?” I don’t remember what I responded. I might have rolled my eyes.

Thankfully, my maid of honor (Dawn) had requested contact info for my sister, Liz. I was overjoyed. Someone else to deal with the minutia of dresses and colors? Go ahead!

To Liz’s credit, she was concerned about the pictures. Something about Dawn and her girls matching. “Honestly, Liz, if they’re in three different shades of purple, I really don’t care.”

“Just don’t want the dresses to clash. That would not look good,” Liz texted.

“But it would be memorable:)” I responded.

“I don’t like the girls to look sloppy,” she wrote.

I didn’t get how clashing colors equaled sloppy. I gave up.

A few weeks before this, my three sisters, who are not in the wedding, were texting with me about my choice of color. Jessica asked, “Should Meg, Liz, Bethany (my sister-in-law), and I all plan to wear a shade of purple? Or do you want us in pastels?” I know most brides dictate the color for their bridal party. But a bride has to tell her siblings what to wear, too??? I have a hard enough time picking a color for a maid of honor, a junior bridesmaid, and a flower girl. Besides the fact that I am the least fashionable of all my sisters (in-law included), so why they’d want me dictating anything about their clothing was beyond my comprehension.

“You could wear red with orange polkadots and I would be fine with that!” I wrote. Jessica responded with an emoticon of a face with a puzzled look on it. Obviously, she didn’t understand my humor.

Thankfully, Meg understood. “We are not in the wedding party so why would we have to coordinate?” she wrote.

“We don’t have to coordinate,” Jess wrote. “I just thought maybe we would want to for family pictures.”

At this point, I was going to have to walk away. I tried humor. I tried patience. So I went rogue and sent a text just to Meg, explaining that we take family pictures at every holiday, and we don’t coordinate our outfits for those! Meg then went behind my back and wrote in the group text, “Becky just informed me we take family pics all the time and don’t match.” Meg included an emoticon of a person laughing so hard they are crying their eyes out. At least someone understood.

So, to sum it all up, here’s the latest on my wedding planning minutia:

I will have lavender in my bouquet.

My maid of honor will wear lavender, or a color that goes nicely with lavender.

My nieces will not clash with my maid of honor.

My sisters will wear whatever they want.

I have said for a few years now that I just want a surprise wedding. Just like a surprise party. I show up. Guests shout, “Surprise!” I’m handed a bouquet, a wedding dress, and we get married. Then all the guests, whom I didn’t have to worry about inviting, eat food that I didn’t have to decide on. And there’s a color scheme. That I did not pick out. And if you asked me at the end of the night what that color was, I’d say, “A color? I didn’t know there was a color.”